by Knife Fight
“Christ, Jim, get up. I can’t do this by myself.”
Max’s eyes slurped open. “Ow,” he said. “Jerry?”
“Fuckin’ A, Jim-bo.” Jerry pulled at Max’s arm again. “I got a wheelchair here. Now come on, get up. The shit’s hitting the fan here, and we gotta move.”
Max winced and sat up. He blinked in the dim light of an infirmary room. Jerry was wearing orderlies’ greens, and, sure enough, he was leaning against a gleaming chrome wheelchair. Max grimaced and swung his feet onto the floor, then swung his behind around and into the wheelchair. Jerry turned it around and pushed it out the door and into a darkened hallway. Behind them, there was another crack of breaking glass, then a howling, and Max felt an icy wind cross the back of his neck. Jerry hurried along the corridor.
“You saw something down there, didn’t you?” said Jerry.
“Mimi’s dead. So’s the rest of the crew on the studio. They were eaten by squids. How do you like that?” Max took a deep breath as Jerry pushed him into a pair of swinging doors. Beyond was a waiting room, rimmed with high frosted windows and a thick metal door marked EXIT on the opposite side. There was a candy machine in one corner, the front of which had been smashed with the fire axe that now lay propped against it. Max and Jerry were the only people in the room.
“A lot of people are dead,” said Jerry. “A lot of people are going to be eaten by squids. Squids won, we lost. Next!”
Max noticed water seeping under the exit door. The puddle grew as he watched, like a bloodstain.
“Atlantica,” said Max. Last time they’d spoken, Jerry had mentioned the storm had moved to the Caribbean and was getting ready to take on the Eastern Seaboard. “It’s here now?”
“Here,” said Jerry, “there. Everywhere. But particularly here. The GET bastards evacuated this morning, before their harbour swamped.”
“And they just left us here?”
“Just left us here.”
Max thought about that. He leaned back in the wheelchair.
“Where’s here?”
“Sable Island,” said Jerry. “GET’s got a base here.”
“So they just left us here,” said Max.
“The guard said I wasn’t worth the bullet it’d take to shoot me,” said Jerry. “Asshole. We gotta get out of here, Jim-bo. We’re going down.”
“You shouldn’t have pulled the stopcocks on the Minnow,” said Max.
Jerry shrugged. “What can I say? I freaked out. You didn’t see all those squid—all grabbing at the hull, scraping it like fingernails on a blackboard. Like they knew I was the one. Like they were smart. And that big one . . . Jesus, he could have torn the Minnow up the middle, and he was getting ready to. I could tell, Jimmy, and I freaked, all right? Sue me.” Jerry’s eyes went wide. “I freaked.”
“I see,” said Max.
Jerry nodded, and smiled in a panicky way. “You would have handled it different, right, Jim-bo? Big survivor guy. You would have had a better plan. Shit, buddy, I wish I’d had you on the deck. I may know television—but you . . . you got an instinct for this stuff.”
“I’m not Jim,” said Max. “My name is Max Fiddler. I am an actor.”
Jerry squinted at him. “We’re not back to this, are we? All right, Max, Jim, whatever you say. Tell me what you saw down there. See where those smart bastards lived? Anything we can use?”
Max looked around him. The entire floor was covered in water now and more was coming. He thought about the mountain and the giant squid—and the glimpses he’d had of the rest of it: the quivering walls of eggs that clung to the upper slopes of the sea mountain and the adult squids that circled them, guarding against the hungry smaller ones; the spectacle of a thousand squid, diving back to their homes in the trench, in sensible retreat from the spreading oil slick around the Minnow; and the behemoth, large beyond scale, that fell past him in the sun-dappled waters near the surface, trailing black strands of the same oil slick that would coat Max’s own armour just a second later; its great black eye as large as Max, with a depth to it that, at first, Max mistook for intellect.
Maybe it was partly intellect he saw in the squid’s eye, but he also recognized something more intimately familiar—and ultimately far more dangerous.
Max wheeled himself over to the exit door. He braced the wheels with his hands and opened the door with his foot.
“Is this a plan?” Jerry asked hopefully. “Because we could sure use a survival plan right now, Jim.”
Rain hit him in a sheet. Max squinted through it, at the raging Atlantica outside. The ocean had indeed come up to the doorstep—if it were clearer outside, he would no doubt be able to see to a flat watery horizon, interrupted by nothing but the tops of a few buildings, and perhaps the semi-circle of a radar dish, poking above the waves.
Behind him, Jerry Wylde shouted something, but it could have been a dog barking at his heel; the roar and thunder of Atlantica was all.
OOPS
A little electric contraption inside played a song every time you opened it. Da, da da Da. Da, da da Da.
He hadn’t heard the song in nearly ten years, but he would have recognized it even if it hadn’t been Sarah Michelle Gellar on the front of the card: wooden stake clutched in one hand, hovering over her breast—her airbrush-smoothed face unmistakably stricken.
Whatever had happened with that stake, she hadn’t meant it.
Inside, one word:
OOPS.
Yeah, he thought: Not much to choose from in the Apology section of the Shoppers Drug Mart greeting card aisle, and why would there be? You bought cards because your friend had a birthday, or got a job, or turned forty, or was going to graduate from something. Not because you fucked up.
He closed the card, left it finishing the Buffy riff on the dark shelf as he made his way back to the prescription counter. He spied movement of light and shadow in back, behind the low shelves of stock. He craned his neck.
“Is it ready yet?” he called.
She emerged, flashlight dangling from one hand. “I’m still looking.”
“Oxytetracycline. Under ‘O’.”
“Oh.” She showed him a middle finger. “We’re not the fucking library.”
“Come on. I’m erupting here.”
She tilted her head, raised an eyebrow, as if to say: No shit. He caught a glimpse of himself in the little mirror by the reading glasses. Florid boils the size of grapes crawled up his neck, swirling around the largest one—the first one—glistening on the edge of real eruption, just beneath his left eye. “No shit,” he said.
She approached the counter, where bars of afternoon sunlight hit it. Her long ginger hair hung matted down the shoulder of her white pharmacist’s smock. She chewed on her lower lip, and as he noticed that, he noticed a small blemish at the corner of her mouth. She must have seen him looking; her hand drifted up to cover it.
“That must really hurt,” she said. “You got painkillers? Tylenol Threes? Vicodin? I know where to find lots of those.”
“That’s not wise,” he said, “all things considered. I’m more worried about the infection than the pain. Stick with the Oxytetracyclene, thanks.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Thanks.”
She went back to the shelves and cupboards, clicked on her flashlight, and he wondered: What was she even doing here? She sure as shit wasn’t a pharmacist.
He took out his own penlight, found his way back to Apologies. Sorry We Missed You, said a clean-cut young man sporting a vintage leisure suit and drawing a bow and arrow on a circa-1972 archery range. How About a Do-Over? was inside a card with a squalling baby wearing an upturned bowl of pasta on her head. Don’t Quack Up Over This was behind a cartoon showing three ducks in straitjackets, in a padded cell, glaring at the ceiling. He clicked the penlight off and stood in the dim, grey light that was all the gathering storm outside would allow.
&n
bsp; At least he had options.
“Hey,” she called from the back, “do you have anything to drink?”
“I assume you don’t mean fruit punch,” he said, and she said, “Fuck no.”
“You proposing a trade?”
“No. I’m talking celebration.” She emerged again, and shone her flashlight on a candy-jar-sized container of pills. “See? Found it.”
“Great.” He dug into his backpack and pulled out a small silver hip flask. An indeterminate amount of scotch sloshed inside.
She had two small plastic cups ready by the time he made it up the aisle, and he measured a dram into each. She lifted hers, took a delicate sip, and made a face. “Nasty,” she said, appreciatively.
“Not used to the hard stuff, are you?” he said, and she motioned to his cup with her flashlight: “Bottoms up,” she said.
“Bottoms up.”
He set the empty cup down and looked at the jar. There had to be a thousand capsules inside. He picked it up, hefted it. “I don’t need all that,” he said. “Give me a week’s worth.”
“How many’s that?”
He squinted. “You’re not from the pharmacy, are you?”
“I am. But I don’t work—didn’t work back here. I do cash. I was on cash when it happened.”
He poured another dram into his cup. She still had lots left in hers and waved him away when he offered. That was fine; she was going to talk about it now. He let his mind wander as she told her story: about how she’d been on shift two hours when the lights seemed to flare, and dim, and then there came a swishing sound. She had been helping a customer, an older man in a light grey business suit. The swishing sound was the sound of the fabric collapsing in on itself, now that the man had vanished.
“Just swish,” she said, and wiggled her fingers. “Not just him. Everybody. Swish.”
“Almost everybody.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you go home?” he asked, and she motioned to the glass storefront. The clouds were massing dark again. And, he saw, the insects were back. They tapped on the windows, and a cyclone of them swirled over the parking lot.
“You’ve seen it out there. You’ve been out there.” She finished her scotch in a gulp, and this time didn’t stop him when he poured some more. “I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. There’s food in here. Lots of water, in bottles. And with the dispensary in the pharmacy—I thought I could do some good. Because that’s important now—right?”
Important, yes. Too late—also likely.
But he didn’t say that. “Right,” he told her. “Have you done some good?”
She shrugged. “You’re the first one to come by. It’s been three days. So you tell me.”
Although it hurt to do so, he smiled. “You’ve done some good.”
“Think it’ll make a difference?”
He sighed. “If I knew,” he said, “I don’t think I’d still be here.”
She asked him more questions: Had he seen anybody else since it happened? When did the boils start? After the event? Had he tried to pray?
Yes, from a distance; and yes, the first one came as he stood alone at the bus stop outside his house, blinking at the flaring sun.
And yes. He had tried to pray.
“But before I get going too long, the question always becomes: What to say? At this point in the game—what do you say?”
She nodded, and announced that she thought she was getting drunk.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, flicking the edge of her empty cup with her thumb, knocking it over. “Maybe this is why—I’m still here.”
“Drinking on the job?” He considered that. “Maybe.”
“You should take one of those pills. Make you better.”
“Maybe,” he said, and unscrewed the top of the jar. He pulled out a capsule—half red, half yellow—and put it on his tongue. He swallowed it dry.
She got unsteadily to her feet, turned and went into a drawer. She came out with an empty pill bottle, and handed it to him.
“Fill it up,” she said, and he did.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” And she repeated, in a pleading, accommodating tone: “Anything?”
“Yes,” he said, and he was glad—and a little sad—to see what looked like relief in her eye when he told her what he needed most.
Da, da da Da.
I am sorry, though for what I do not know, he wrote as he stood on the sidewalk outside the Shoppers Drug Mart. The locusts lighted on his shoulders, in his hair, before they were carried away in the hot wind that swirled over top the empty cars and trucks that sat empty in the parking lot.
Da, da da Da.
He looked at it again—and crossed it out, and wrote, Forgive me. Then he scratched that out, and circled OOPS!, and signed his name below that, and shut the card. He held it lightly between thumb and forefinger, and raised it over his head—and stood there until the music stopped, until the wind snatched it from him and carried it away with the locusts.
“Thank you for the pen!” he said, back inside. “Hey—thanks!” He took two more steps into the store. “Hey!”
In the end, he slipped the borrowed pen into the breast pocket of the pharmacist’s smock where he found it, curled empty like a sleeping cat on the floor behind the counter.
THE NOTHING BOOK OF THE DEAD
Dearest Neal,
You will receive many gifts through your long life, and all of them, you will find, are precisely what you make of them—nothing more and nothing less.
I remain curious as to what you will make of this one.
Love Forever,
Grandmother
(from the frontispiece of Neal R. Smith’s The Nothing Book, originally published 1974 by Harmony Books)
Dear Granny
Grandmother
Thank you for the nice present. I thought it might be a Hardy Boys book or an Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigaters Investigators book because it was about the right size. Imagine my suprize surprise when I opened the present and found that it was a book abowt about NOTHING. All blank pages! It is the most stupid present I ever got and mom made me right write you a thank you letter so I am writing it in this book and sent it sending it back to you as a lesson to send me something good next time.
Your Stupid Grandson
Love
Neal
(from the dedication to Neal R. Smith’s The Nothing Book, ibid)
Dearest Neal,
You are very welcome for your gift this Christmas and thank you for your wittily composed inscription. I promise in future years that I shall calibrate my choice in gifts so as to better accommodate your delicate sensibilities. In the meantime, I have taken the liberty of returning this one, and your inscription, with corrections in spelling appended. I have not for the most part commented upon your grammar and syntax, because I am one of those who believes such things accumulate into that rare and precious quality we name a writer’s voice.
And so I return your Nothing Book, with notes appended and this brief inscription, and the remainder of the pages blank, that you might fill it with more fine prose such as this. Should you care to send me that prose, in whatever form you might choose, I would be very happy to read it and return comments.
Love Forever,
Grandmother
p.s. For your birthday, perhaps I shall send along a G.I. Joe playset, the one with the miniature Egyptian mummy. Doubtless you will think of me as you fiddle about with its vulgar contents.
(from the Introduction to Neal R. Smith’s The Nothing Book, Ibid)
Chapter 1
The Vicars of Thun-Krakar
The many-jewelled city of Thun-Krakar boiled with the anger of its inhabitants. The swordsman went in through the front gate and imme
diately realized his mistake. Although he was the finest swordsman in all of Italy, he feared he was no match for the wrath of the evil Vicars of Thun-Krakar.
They stood in a line inside the gate. “Would you like to come round for tea?” said their leader, the imposing and deadly Father Postlewait.
A trap, thought the swordsman, whose name happened to be Eric. He pulled out his deadly blade Lasagne and rushed them. A lot of blood soon followed and Eric the swordsman stepped over the bleeding Vicars’ bodies and made for the tavern.
(from Neal R. Smith’s novel fragment entitled “An Italian in Thun-Krakar,” The Nothing Book, Ibid)
Dearest Grandson,
What a wonderful attempt at the narrative form! Truly, you are a gem of a child; a genuine prodigy! Why, I see in this the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Monty Python, all rolled up into one—with a marvellously discreet approach to violence so often absent in the films and novels of the past decade. I do wonder where Thun-Krakar might be located, in relation to Rome. Is it a Spanish town? Perhaps it is farther off in the other direction, in the Balkans perhaps, and the Vicars are English missionaries at work saving the souls of the perennially cross folk who make their homes there?
No, grandson, do not answer. Let my own imagination do the work. It helps to pass the hours in this accursed ward room.
Love,
Grandmother
(from the end-notes to Neal R. Smith’s novel fragment entitled “An Italian in Thun-Krakar,” The Nothing Book, Ibid)
A Potion to Cure All Illness
Mix Together In One Cauldron Made of Iron:
5 Fingernail Clippings from the Hand of a MURDERER
The Right Whisker of a BLACK CAT
1 cup, EPSOM SALTS
1 Teaspoon, GARLIC POWDER
1 shot, IRISH WHISKEY
1 can, ROOTBEER
Bring to a boil while chanting EPLUBUM F’THAGIS SILFU G’TAUGH seven times. This potion will CURE ALL ILLNESS.